Vendors

Storage killer, SimpliVity, is closing in on market leader, Nutanix, in the booming hyper-converged infrastructure business.

The company, which crams everything below the hypervisor into its Omnnicube, with the support of x86 servers, has hit a $US1 billion valuation nine months faster than its bigger rival and is growing at three to four times year over year, in terms of sales.

It has also grown its staff from 100 to 460 in just two years.

Nutanix and SimpliVity were both founded in September 2009. However by April 2011, Nutanix had shipped their first product.

Simplivity spent two more years developing an accelerator card, a new file system and a global unification system.

It shipped it first box in April, 2013 and since then has sold 2,000 systems to its target market of mid-market enterprises with less than $US2 billion turnover.

The secret of its success is that it deduplicates, compresses and optimises the data at inception or at the earliest point in the stack. This means there is no need for storage deduplication, WAN optimisation or backup deduplication.

It also means the backing up, cloning or recovering of VMs is much faster.

SimpliVity also now supports the KVM hypervisor and OpenStack, along with VMware’s ESXi, which could open the way for a smaller cheaper box for smaller businesses.

But while SimpliVity attempts to rein in the runaway Nutanix, challengers are also making headway in what is becoming a crowded market. They include Pivot3, VCE, Maxta, VMware, Scale Computing and EMC.

However, SimpliVity chairman and chief executive, Doron Kempel, told ARN he was confident his company’s technology, which he describes as “convergence 3.0”, would stand up to rivals and anticipated readiness for an initial public offering in the first half of 2016.

"This is great for VDI, but you still need to buy efficiency and global uinfied management. We put all of this into the cubes and we call this convergence 3.0.

“If this is true, this is an architecture which delivers the best of both worlds.

“If we meet with the customer and we tell them what I’m telling you and the customers believe that all of this goes into these boxes, then 78 per cent of them buy SimpliVity, the win ratio is quite remarkable.”

While Cisco is currently a partner with its UCS servers, Kempel said the plan was to be server agnostic in the near future.

“Cisco is a great partner because they don’t have storage portfolio, so they don’t fear us. The two players that we thought were optimal for us were Lenovo and Cisco,” he said.

“One of the things that we looked to do with Simplivity was to dedupe, optimise and compress the data at inception so that nobody can do it earlier,” he said.

“The questions we asked ourselves in 2009 is why so many products? Our view is the architecture of the data, the day the data is being managed, is not meant to address a world with VMware, Amazon a deluge of datacentres. There is just too much data, too many IOPS.

“What we did is we fixed the data problem and around our data architecture we added the functionality on one cube.”

“All you need to do is vMotion and storage motion (with partner VMware), and your data moves into the smaller boxes.

“This has been our vision since December 2009, when we decided to give a green light to this particular project.

“We started the company in 2009 and we spent 43 months developing version 1.0. This is approximately two times the length or your normal IT company.”

SimpliVity vice president, APJ, Scott Morris, said the company was 100 per cent channel aligned with Distribution Central as its distributor in Australia and New Zealand.

“We have no direct sales force anywhere around the globe and that’s quite unique from a vendor perspective,” he said.

“More than 50 per cent of our global revenues come from outside of North America. From an organisation that has only been shipping product for just on two years that’s quite a different approach to a market that is expanding very quickly.

He said the company now had a presence in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane.

“But clearly our go to market is leveraging that distribution base and the smarts of channel recruitment and using a thin provision front from a sales point of view to be able to extend our channel and recruiting.

“Right now we have about 17 partners aligned across A/NZ. But we have about 8 to 10 in the pipeline and we will see some quite significant names emerge.

“You will see a revolution in the industry and a game changer in total cost of ownership reduction.

“The real simplicity of what we bring to the table is in terms of simplifying the IT datacentre.”

Channel Deals

MSI Cubi Mini-PC

ARN Distributor Directory

ARN Vendor Directory

Slideshows

​Inside the new HP Customer Welcome Centre in Sydney…

HP unveiled its new Customer Welcome Centre (CWC) in Sydney this week, following on more than a year after the vendor opened the doors of its Experience Centre in Melbourne (MEC). The new space offers on-site HP technicians and visiting channel partners the ability to reconfigure equipment and put together tailored solutions based on the needs of individual end clients or target vertical markets. The centre can also be booked by customers and partners for meetings, events, workshops, seminars, and training. Photos by HP.

Zscaler Australia toasts the channel at Xmas drinks

Zscaler recently hosted its partner update and Christmas drinks event in Australia where more than 20 partners attended the event at the QT hotel in the Sydney. The event provided a forum for the company to update its Australian partners on the company's strategy for cloud security in the year ahead. It was also a great opportunity for the company to introduce Sean Kopelke as country manager for A/NZ. The event ended with Christmas drinks and a celebration of momentum gained in 2016.

IN PICTURES: ​Nutanix X Tours

Nutanix recently held two ‘X Tours’, which brought the company’s flagship event .NEXT to Brisbane and Melbourne. Customers and partners got a firsthand look at the new era of IT and exposure to the potential of the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud platform. Both events featured key speakers both from Nutanix and its partners.

iasset.com is a channel management ecosystem that automates all major aspects of the entire sales, marketing and service process, including data tracking, integrated learning, knowledge management and product lifecycle management.

Copyright 2016 IDG Communications. ABN 14 001 592 650. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part in any form or medium without express written permission of IDG Communications is prohibited.